Mars Candy Investigating Mysterious Skittles Spill On Highway, No Clue Where They Came From

It began last week, when officers with the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office stumbled upon a downright bizarre sight on a rural highway roughly 60 miles west of Milwaukee. The blacktop almost glowed in the dark – a shimmery, oddly beautiful red. The entire highway was a sea of the color, stretching further than the eye can see in a photograph released by the Sheriff’s Office.

Closer inspection revealed the source of such otherworldly beauty wasn’t a mystery of the natural world. It was hundreds of thousands of Skittles, all of them strawberry, all of them strangely missing the candy’s white “S” on the hard shells.

A few days later, authorities had gotten the whole scoop. According to police, the Skittles were being driven in a flatbed truck to be mixed with more cattlefeed and then fed to cattle. An unnamed farmer allegedly purchased this particular batch.

They wrote:

“The Skittles were confirmed to have fallen off the back of a truck. The truck was a flatbed pickup and the Skittles were in a large box. Due to it raining at the time, the box got wet and gave way allowing the Skittles to spill out on the roadway. It is reported that the Skittles were intended to be feed for cattle as they did not make the cut for packaging at the company. In the end these Skittles are actually for the Birds!”

That might sound odd – It certainly did to many on the Internet, such as the New York Post which wrote “Farmers have been secretly feeding cows Skittles.” – but feeding cattle discarded foodstuffs is actually increasingly common, especially as corn prices continue to rise.